Some like to be one thing, some another. There is so much to be done,
so many different things to do, so many trades! Shepherds, soldiers,
sailors, ploughmen, carters--one could go on all day naming without
getting to the end of them. For myself, boy and man, I have been
many things, working for a living, and sometimes doing things just
for pleasure; but somehow, whatever I did, it never seemed quite the
right and proper thing to do--it never quite satisfied me. I always
wanted to do something else--I wanted to be a carpenter. It seemed
to me that to stand among wood-shavings and sawdust, making things
at a bench with bright beautiful tools out of nice-smelling wood,
was the cleanest, healthiest, prettiest work that any man can do.
Now all this has nothing, or very little, to do with my story: I
only spoke of it because I had to begin somehow, and it struck me
that I would make a start that way. And for another reason, too.
_His father was a carpenter_. I mean Martin's father--Martin, the
Little Boy Lost. His father's name was John, and he was a very good
man and a good carpenter, and he loved to do his carpentering better
than anything else; in fact as much as I should have loved it if I
had been taught that trade. He lived in a seaside town, named
Southampton, where there is a great harbour, where he saw great
ships coming and going to and from all parts of the world. Now, no
strong, brave man can live in a place like that, seeing the ships
and often talking to the people who voyaged in them about the
distant lands where they had been, without wishing to go and see
those distant countries for himself. When it is winter in England,
and it rains and rains, and the east wind blows, and it is grey and
cold and the trees are bare, who does not think how nice it would be
to fly away like the summer birds to some distant country where the
sky is always blue and the sun shines bright and warm every day? And
so it came to pass that John, at last, when he was an old man, sold